Read Next

Charles Bausman, the editor of Russia Insider, has published an extraordinary article in which he says that he wishes to “break the Jewish taboo”, and in which he appears to single out Jewish people in the West for their supposed particular hostility to Russia.

The article appears to put the blame for the present disastrous state of Western-Russian relations on Jewish people in ways which I find both extremely disturbing and frankly concerning.

This article comes with an account of Russian history and of Russia’s interactions with Jews and of White Russian attitudes to Jews which is wrong in so many places as to give a fundamentally distorted view of that history

There has been an excellent rebuttal of this article by Dmitri Babich, published by The Duran and Russia Feed to which I have little to add.However I do want to make one specific point.

The core of Charles Bausman’s article is a list of well known media personalities in the US and Britain who take strongly hostile positions against President Putin and the Russian government and who happen to have Jewish backgrounds.

Producing a list of individuals in this way however seriously distorts the nature of the Western media’s hostility to Russia.

I follow the mainstream media in the US and Britain closely, and what is striking and depressing about it is the uniformity of its hostility to Russia.

This hostility extends all the way from what was once called the ‘left’ towhat was once called the ‘right’. It includes both Jews and non-Jews.

To the extent that some of the better known media personalities who in the West write and speak about Russia in the news media happen to have Jewish origins that is purely a function of the fact that for well-known cultural and historical reasons journalism is a trade which in the West tends to attract people with Jewish backgrounds.

There is no evidence however that Western journalists or media tycoons who are not Jewish (the great majority) are any less hostile to President Putin or to the Russian government or to Russia than are those who are Jewish.

In Britain none of the four most stridently anti-Russian newspapers – the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times and the Guardian – have Jewish proprietors.

In the case of the London Times the proprietor is the Australian/American billionaire publisher and businessman Rupert Murdoch, who is known to micromanage his newspapers, and who is also known to be extremely hostile to President Putin and to Russia.

In the case of the Daily Telegraph the proprietors are the strongly conservative Barclay brothers, whose background is south London working class English.

In the case of the Financial Times it is Nikkei Inc., which is Japanese.

The Guardian is an exceptional case, being an independent newspaper funded by a (rapidly dwindling) trust.Its best known and arguably most strident anti Russian journalist is Luke Harding, author of such anti Putin classics as “Mafia State” and “Collusion”, who is however not Jewish.

Speaking of Britain, in my experience the two communities within the British establishment that are by far the most resistant to the current anti-Russian wave are academia and especially the legal profession.Again for well known cultural and historical reasons Jews are strongly represented in both.

By contrast the most monolithically and ferociously anti-Russian communities within the British establishment are the senior ranks of the military and the intelligence services.Again for well known cultural and historical reasons Jews are barely represented in either.

Though I am less familiar with the composition of the political establishment in the US, it seems to me that the pattern there is roughly the same.

Academia and especially the legal profession, in both of which people with Jewish backgrounds are strongly represented, are the most resistant communities within the US establishment to the current wave of anti-Russian hysteria.

By contrast the communities within the US establishment which have most enthusiastically embraced it are the senior ranks of the military and the intelligence services, in neither of which do people of Jewish background appear to be represented to any great degree.

Speaking of the intelligence services, so far as I can tell none of the chiefs of Barack Obama’s intelligence community who in 2016 bought heavily into the Russiagate conspiracy theory – Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and McCabe – are Jewish.

Clapper comes from an old military family, Brennan’s background is Irish Catholic, Comey was brought up a Catholic but is now a Methodist, and McCabe’s name and background (he was born in Hartford, Connecticut) suggest strongly that he is not Jewish.

European Russophobia has deep historic roots, in Britain and France going back to the nineteenth century, in Germany and Poland going back further still.

In the case of the US Russophobia appears to have taken root at the start of the twentieth century, partly in response to the Russian Revolution but also as a consequence of the mass immigration to the US of Europeans who had already become Russophobic in their homelands.

Jewish people have been affected by this phenomenon, but they did not cause it, are not responsible for it now, and should certainly not be singled out for blame for it.

The malignant ideologies of pseudo-liberalism, politically applied post-modernism and Russophobia, which are the cause of so much harm, do not have a national or ethnic or racial origin. They are the disastrous products of this particular stage of Western culture.

Saying otherwise in a publication such as Russia Insider which claims to defend and explain Russia to the people of the West is a particular betrayal, given that during the Second World War tens of millions of Russians laid down their lives in order to save humanity from the appalling consequences of this sort of malign racist thinking, saving the Jewish people of Europe in the process. That is the true Russia, the Russia that we seek to defend and explain in our companion site RussiaFeed.

Those who argue otherwise are wrong, and they are not welcome on The Duran.